React, etc. Tech Stack

CockroachDB is a Scalable, Geo-Replicated, Transactional Datastore. Like the cockroach it is designed to be distributed and survive a proverbial nuclear war on the web. It could be a very viable technology for deploying global online services with minimal latency and overhead.

The Facebook dev team has stack given us lots of innovation in the server and in the client domains. With HHVM, Hack, React, Flux, Relay and more they're already knee deep in powering a number of high profile in addition to Facebook.com itself. But there is one area the company has chosen not to invest in: CSS and supporting technologies such as SASS or LESS.

Despite it's size and focus at the consumer market, Facebook is very much a company driven by software and developers. This shows in their efforts of creating (sometimes rather unique) solutions to their own internal problems and then sharing those as Open Source. Just like the Symfony community, Facebook invests in Developer Experience by providing development tooling for these solutions.

Java Virtual Machine as a platform seems to have gone through a renaissance, not exactly the same as PHP, but similar. Somehow languages ranging from Scala to Clojure to Ruby are raising the JVM fever. And this all makes sense.

Over the years there has been tremendous investment to JVM as a platform. The original JVM language, Java, might seem stale to some - but the shared runtime allows inheriting this heritage with new syntax and paradigms.

People love to pit two competing products together. Be it sports cars, cameras or software. Everyone likes to cheer for their personal preference. This is now happening with PHP 7, HHVM and others inspiring people to create pointless benchmarks.

CSS has come a long way in helping web designers and developers to reach the kind of richness allowed by print layouts. Now we can go a step further by augmenting 3D transformations into our photos, giving them motion graphics not possible in a static media.

Hack is a programming language for the HipHop Virtual Machine (HHVM), created by Facebook as a dialect of PHP. The language implementation is open source, licensed under the BSD License.

While it is close to PHP it is not that exactly and can move away from the realm altogether as it progresses. In modern web development you'll need an IDE to keep your project organized and help you perform routine tasks easily.